Electronic Book Review - techhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/tech
enThe Cybernetic Turn: Literary into Cultural Criticismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/hyperreal
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Tabbi</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-10-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In a January 2000 <span class="booktitle">TLS</span> review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would evidently oppose <span class="lightEmphasis">this</span> America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span>).</p>
<p>To the contributors in <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span>, however, Baudrillard’s America is no less real than the vanishing spaces of the naturalist tradition; and its media representations are by now so familiar that they hardly count as news. Now that Roland Barthes’s “empire of signs” has been digitized, continental theory sounds less provocative, more descriptive of things as they are. What is new, however, and what separates this collection from mainstream critical writing, is the editors’ recognition that, with the technologization of everything, criticism itself no longer looks the same: “When the distance between the real and the imaginary begins to disappear,” they write, “there is no longer any space for an ideal or critical projection.” And so, beyond the global understanding of America offered from these mostly European critics, the collection poses a local problem for critical writing: Under circumstances of simulation, working in the nonspace of Baudrillard’s hyperreal and the virtual reality of cybernetic media, what’s left for criticism itself to do?</p>
<p>When literature’s most compelling historical fictions have “long given up the binary concept of fact versus imagination” and when mass media imagery has made “the very concept of ‘representation’…problematic,” it makes little sense to think of criticism as a <span class="lightEmphasis">mediation</span> between fiction and reality, or as a guide to the imaginative life of great and distant authors. Close reading becomes redundant when the media environment closes in on perception, and the more we are able to engineer our own dreams the harder it becomes “to imagine anything other than what is,” as Fredric Jameson already noted in 1971 (cited by Kraus and Auer). As a Marxist, Jameson of course deplored the absence of any “great political and Utopian theories,” but the essays in this collection, presented originally at a November 1997 conference in Graz, Austria, take a more affirmative stance. Like Jameson, many of these writers deal with science fiction but (unlike Jameson) they don’t find SF’s utopian or critical possibilities very compelling. There are no cognitive maps of Simulacrum America, only further acts of cognition. Hence a more likely role for criticism is to become, like the work it discusses, not so much a separate genre as “a mode of awareness about the world,” less a utopian or even a future-oriented project than a reflective engagement with the world as it is (Kraus and Auer, citing Csiscery-Ronay).</p>
<p>But SF is not the only topic under discussion in this wide-ranging volume. Interactive media, Baudrillard’s and Don DeLillo’s “cultural pathology,” Avant-Pop literature, Africa Online, and the simulated realities of empire, gender identity, cinematic representation, and social reportage all come in for sustained analysis. The range of subjects covered over seventeen essays and a substantial introduction indicates the extent of the recent migration of literary into cultural criticism. Without doubt, the collection can be recommended for adoption in forward looking classes in American Cultural Studies, whose emergence as a discipline - really the reorientation of existing disciplines - is in some ways a product of the mediated reality it studies. In fact, my one reservation about this collection - extending to a reservation about the idea of America itself as a simulated reality - would be that the essays lack an independent organizing principle - independent, that is, of the media they engage. What, if anything, could have been left out? Having given up on a specifically <span class="lightEmphasis">literary</span> otherness - the defamiliarizing force of aesthetic interest, literature’s onetime source of utopian possibility - criticism more and more often meets the media system on <span class="lightEmphasis">its</span> terms, following topics and agendas that <span class="lightEmphasis">it</span> selects.</p>
<p>But at the same time as criticism sustains a fascination with popular culture, it has yet to achieve the degree of selectivity and self-reflexivity that has evolved in the mass media themselves. These work as an independent system, according to the German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, not by filling in for an absent reality (as Baudrillard suggests) but by reducing the complexity of the cultural environment to a single distinction - between information and non-information. Unless an item (of news, entertainment, advertising, and so forth) can be perceived as information, its reality remains outside the media system and unavailable for simulation. A disorganized, non-informatable environment does exist - it is real, it can be experienced, and it may even be true. But this reality will not be visible to the media system unless it can be cast as information - the only value the media are prone to recognize. “Without such a reflexive value,” Luhmann writes,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">the system would be at the mercy of everything that comes its way; and that also means it would be unable to distinguish itself from the environment, to organize its own reduction of complexity, its own selection.</p>
<p>If our media-constructed reality does indeed remain wholly “within information,” as the cyberspace theorist Marcos Novak recognizes, must we “ourselves be reduced to bits” in order to be “represented by the system”? In Novak, and in the Cyberpunk novelists considered by Elisabeth Kraus, Alen Vitas, and others, the response to an exclusively informational reality is to produce more of the same, to create verbal and visual “landscapes of spatialized information” where we ourselves might “become information anew” (Novak, cited by Kraus). Thus when the novel is competitively challenged by proliferating non-literary modes of narration and representation, Cyberpunk’s “answer,” its “last line of defense,” has been “to make narrative fiction more ‘digital’ and thus able to compete with digital media in the battle for an increasingly dissipating audience” (Vitas). Few observers of the scene ever thought it likely that such resistance would be effective over the long term, as the writers themselves went on in their careers “galloping in a dozen directions at once” (Sterling, cited by Frelik). A more cogent argument, advanced by critics versed in cognitive psychology and media discourse theory, holds that literature is more successful when it emphasizes its medial otherness - its stability in print, its longer cycles of production and reception that protect it from the mass media’s high rate of turnover, and its discreteness in bound volumes which helps sustain in readers the illusion of a world apart. Pavel Frelik gets at this last distinction when he opposes literature’s traditional aim of “creating cognitive dissonance” with attempts to “bridge that gap” in later Cyberpunk fiction. Instead of seeking a platform for resistance outside the media system, Cyberpunk keeps close to the periphery as “a genre about the world that we know but don’t know and about the future which exists to enable us to understand the present.”</p>
<p>What Frelik is describing in Cyberpunk fiction is a cognition that is more fluid and surrounding than dissonant or distancing, more like the communications media themselves in that it vigorously forgets the past and anticipates only those future elements that it can act on <span class="lightEmphasis">in the present</span>. The priority of present information over established “truth” is given by Ruediger Kunow in an essay on Robert Coover, E.L. Doctorow, and other novelists writing second-order historical fictions “in the face of Media Representations of American history.” The media representations, Kunow notes, can be discussed</p>
<p class="longQuotation">independently of their truth status vis-à-vis a past real so that they can be seen as part of a discursive praxis in which historical material is made present.</p>
<p>For these postmodernist writers, ignoring the media images is not an option: the images are present as a publicly accessible, distributed cognitive background against which any focused, personal, and conscious understanding has to set itself. And this, too, helps explain the strength of the media, what creates their overall reality-effect. Neither the media nor distributed cognition can burden themselves with too much memory; their task is not to store up past events indiscriminately for eventual recall and meditation but rather to delete traces of the past so as to free up capacities. What is held in mind or kept on file from the past signifies only by comparison with present developments, and past events will be recalled only if they can show up differences, constructing the present as news. Such cognition could not be less congenial to the ordinary process of literary self-creation, which has traditionally been about remembering, not forgetting: Recollection in tranquility. A madeleine. Literature has evolved ways of its own to bridge the gap and to make the past present; but meditation in literature is worlds away and out of synch with the flows of mediated time.</p>
<p>Critical writers trained on the literary tradition may not like the media system, but its criteria for producing a full and continuing present are at least clear. Criticism should be no less clear in distinguishing literature’s and its own medial difference, and instead of responding reflexively to signals sent out by the media system, criticism needs to articulate its own principle of reflexivity, a way for it (and us) to distinguish ourselves from the media system, without ignoring its demands on our attention.</p>
<p>There are, in fact, a number of essays in the collection that hint at new formulations of self-reflexivity in literary, historical, and more recently, technologically mediated, narratives - especially those “active and reflexive” self-constructions that, according to Karin Esders, allow for “an expansion of individual life” in the media environment. Esders’s terms for such expansive processes, however - “irony, self-mockery, humor, and playfulness” - repeat the values of an older, more specifically literary postmodernism. That in itself does not invalidate them except for the fact that the playful ironic stance has already been codified, co-opted, and widely recirculated as a recognizable style by the very media they were meant to critique. If identity is nothing but a simulation, what’s to prevent mainstream culture from simulating minority stances - appropriating the language of victimization, presenting its protagonists as “queer,” misrepresented, colonized by hegemonic power? And if identity is nothing more than a media construction, what’s to keep modern agencies from having an individual’s “perceptions stamped <span class="lightEmphasis">Acceptable Per Government Regulatory Standards</span> ” (Cadigan, cited by Kraus)? As Ruth Mayer points out in her essay on the black music scene of the late 1990s, pop cultural resistance is “a highly precarious stance, liable to be turned against its originator at the very next moment and to be appropriated by the very persons it meant to oppose in the first place.” There is something robust - Mayer calls it “style,” Luhmann would call it a necessarily incomplete reduction of complexity - going on at the periphery of <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span>, and surely one practical function of criticism in the present media system would be to identify shifting terms of self-stylization through emerging channels of communication.</p>
<p>To do this without criticism itself becoming a co-opting agent is of course no small challenge. And the difficulty of creating a critical reflexivity appropriate to, but different from, the reflexivity of the mass media is well illustrated in Peter Schneck’s treatment of Avant-Pop fiction in the U.S. Among the first to proclaim, “Nomo Pomo,” Avant-Pop writers rely not so heavily on postmodern irony and ideology critique. Instead, they would appropriate, in Larry McCaffery’s words,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">these glitzy, kitschy, easily consumable pop materials [as] a rich source of ‘raw material’ whose elements can be explored, played with, and otherwise creatively transformed… for sustained improvisational purposes. (cited in Schneck)</p>
<p>Although Schneck is skeptical of such claims (they sound to him “rather like having your cake and eating it too”), his consideration leads him into a fresh understanding of one particular mode or moment in the evolution of literary reflexivity. Schneck no longer sees self-awareness as the reflexive mirroring that was such an important thematic in both literature and literary theory of the 1960s - when for example John Barth in his proto-postmodernist essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” could explicitly reject the new “intermedia” arts (like pop art or happenings) in favor of “the kind of art that not many people can do,” meaning, of course, literature and especially the novel (cited by Schneck). In its exclusively literary self-reflexings, Barth’s funhouse turns out to be the post-structuralist prison-house of language, whose self-imposed boundaries are perhaps only the limitations of a high cultural elitism. Contemporary with, and opposed to, Barth, we have Susan Sontag’s anti-literary call for the creation of a new and more fluid sensibility whose art is “a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility” (cited in Schneck). Yet once such cultural distinctions (between high and low art, literary culture and popular media) have been sufficiently weakened, there is little to keep an instrumentalized art from turning into advertising, while the once radical conception of an authorless textuality risks becoming yet another belittling, by an especially well-connected critic, of unsponsored individual accomplishment. Indeed, any art that consciously sets out to modify consciousness or increase sensory awareness risks being put in the service of control.</p>
<p>Sontag’s stance “Against Interpretation” therefore anticipates and urges on the loss of critical distance in <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span>. Her work I think rightly rejects the notion of criticism as a secondary or belated activity, but it offers no constructive alternative to the self-reflective gaze offered by the media culture. (Sontag’s primary point of reference, not coincidentally, is photography.) The critic looks at how the world is looked at through media, but what is missing - and what the best contemporary fiction and critical theory manages to evoke - is a second look that reflects our own motives in observing. Instead of attacking an observer’s ideological commitments from a distanced critical stance, the critic might ask how it is that a given media image was produced, and how it might be produced differently, from a different position within the field of production. Karin Esders gets at this potential displacement of one observational position by another, differently positioned, observer when she notices how reading on the Internet can “tend to multiply relationships, subject positions and possible truths” and so generate “an awareness of the constructed nature of realities and identities.” Everything in <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span> may be a construction and identity may be limited, as Wittgenstein noted, by “the limits of our narrative traditions,” but one thing we now have to work with is our <span class="lightEmphasis">awareneness</span> of this. “The discovery that subjectivity forms rather than reflects its objects of cognition,” in Kraus’s words, offers a perspective on our own subjectivity that is unavailable to the massive first-order reflexivity of the media system.</p>
<p>The emergence of this critical sensibility - employing second-order observations separate from the primary observations within the media system - has consequences that the collection’s less strictly literary essays already put to use. Carolin Auer’s discussion of social reportage, where a nineteenth-century sociologist goes incognito among her working class subjects, is an especially useful case in point because anthropology has often been plagued by the problem of how the anthropologist should situate herself in relation to her “subjects.” The power of anthropological research, clearly, is that from the anthropologist’s very different analytical position, assumptions invisible to the human subject under observation can be readily pointed out. The subject’s blind spots can be illuminated - or rather resituated - as the subject, over time, creates for herself (or has created for her) a new lifeworld. (This can of course develop through more direct forms of colonization than anthropological observation; what is certain, however, is that the lifeworld, if not the individual lives observed, <span class="lightEmphasis">will</span> change as a result of observation.) But what of the anthropologist’s own assumptions and blind spots? The anthropologist might sympathize with the inequalities that produce the worker’s lifeworld; she might even share in its burdens by taking a factory job and moving among the people, incognito (although, unlike them, she always carries emergency money in her jacket lining). But so long as the participant observer can <span class="lightEmphasis">go back to</span> her own privileges and her own protected lifeworld, “gaps and distortions” in perception will remain. Such an observer, no matter how well informed or how experienced in the ways and the hardships of the factory worker, is hardly in a position to mediate between class interests. The most one can expect is that, in observing hidden assumptions within the worker’s lifeworld, the anthropologist will be in a position to revise the assumptions on which her own security rests. A political consequence would be the obligation to agitate for the extension of one’s own rights and protections, rather than a direct call for redistribution of wealth or an attempted mediation by one class on the part of the other.</p>
<p>As experimental literature turns away from a representational aesthetic and philosophy no longer pretends to offer intelligible mediations of the real, cultural anthropology may be getting away from the notion that the reporter’s role is to <span class="lightEmphasis">represent</span> her subject’s interests. This movement away from mediation and representation does not however “rule out the functionality of turn-of-the-century social reportage as an instrument of social reform,” although it could well lead one to question the goal of instrumentality <span class="lightEmphasis">per se</span>. If we could let “the ideal of mediation…yield to the fact of constructedness,” as Auer suggests, our lost critical distance and suspicion of narrative authenticity would no longer emerge as <span class="lightEmphasis">problems</span>. Documentary narrative might then still achieve authenticity “by oscillating between concealing and foregrounding its operations,” and criticism could handle its own positioning within the media system by fluctuating between the material and conceptual, letting one mode of understanding compensate for the limitations in the other (Auer).</p>
<p>A similar concern with observation - specifically, the observation of how others observe, and how we in turn notice ourselves being observed - has been a longtime concern in gender studies and is likely to be central to the emerging field of queer studies. Work in this area has been concerned explicitly with disrupting or “queering” representation. In much the way that Esders remarks on the multiplication of Internet identities, queer theory wants to complicate linear, “strait,” traditions in narrative and “dismantle fixed identities” - not least the identities marked by the standardized phrases, “gay” and “lesbian” (de Lauretis, summarized by Braidt). We see this “deconstruction of the autonomous subject” at work in Jeanne Cortiel’s and Andrea B. Braidt’s reflections on “simulated sexualities” in scenes from a number of independent films by self-marked queer directors. A beautiful, “excessively feminine” woman walks into an elevator; she is watched by her mobster boyfriend but she herself initiates eye contact with a stranger, a butch woman whom the boyfriend barely notices. Reading this scene as an audience member, the viewer for whom the entire incident has been staged, Cortiel notes the tension between hetero “scenarios of voyeurism” normalized by Hollywood and “the lesbian look” that we, as knowing observers, are (at least momentarily) encouraged to adopt. The terms with which Cortiel describes this bi-valence suggest that established discourse about “the gaze of the other” might be generalized and enriched from the perspective of systems theory and second-order observation theory: “To access the lesbian look,” Cortiel writes, “the heterosexual cinematic gaze in these films first establishes the authority of this deviant look and then systematically dismantles its identificatory power.” But - crucially - it is the observer herself whose gaze is “destabilized,” now that she has been made to see openings in the network of observations and self-observations that constitute the social.</p>
<p>If queer theory has something to gain in conceptual clarity from Luhmann’s systems theory, that theory in its turn could well gain in referential richness from queer theory and film studies as these are practiced in the later sections of <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span>. Less concerned with conceptual forms of reflexivity (how we observe, how we know), these essays are more about stressing a medial and material reflexivity - an awareness about the difference embodiment and mediality make. Not all media, after all, are mass media operating within the realm of information; there will always exist, at the edges of or lurking beneath the media system, chances for subjective identification not yet formalized by the mass media. This is one source of the emergence and continued unraveling of new cultural styles, but of what “material” is style made? is it physical? is it chemical? genetic? ecological? At times, contra Baudrillard, the essays in <span class="booktitle">Simulacrum America</span> suggest that the real problem facing society is a proliferation, not a loss, of what one contributor calls “the referential element” (Stockinger). If that poses real problems of containment within current disciplinary structures, the discovery of so many materialities at least suggests that “the human element” is unlikely to emerge from a single source in a massively mediated, “hyperreal world.”</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">This review appears in the Fall 2001 issue of the <span class="booktitle">Scandinavian Review of American Studies</span>.</span></p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra” (1983). <span class="booktitle">In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation</span>. Ed. With an Intoduction by Brian Wallis. Foreword by Marcia Tuctio. Boston: Godine, 1984. 253-81.</p>
<p>Cadigan, Pat. <span class="booktitle">Mindplayers</span>. New York: Bantam, 1987.</p>
<p>Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway.” <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction Studies</span> 18 (1991): 387-404.</p>
<p>de Lauretis, Theresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. An Introduction.” <span class="booktitle">differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultual Studies</span>. (Summer 1991): vii-xviii.</p>
<p>Jameson, Fredric. <span class="booktitle">Marxixm and Form: Twentieth-Century Cialectical Theories of Literature</span>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.</p>
<p>Luhmann, Niklas. <span class="booktitle">The Reality of the Mass Media</span>. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.</p>
<p>Norfolk, Lawrence. “Closing time in the fun-house” (review of David Foster Wallace’s <span class="booktitle">Brief Interviews with Hideous Men</span>). <span class="booktitle">Times Literary Supplement</span> (January 14, 2000): 25-26.</p>
<p>Sontag, Susan. “One Culture.” In <span class="booktitle">Against Interpretation and Other Essays</span>. New York: Farrar, Straus amp; Giroux, 1966.</p>
<p>Sterling, Bruce. “Preface to Mirrorshades.” <span class="booktitle">Storming the Reality Studio</span>. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 343-48.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/norfolk">norfolk</a>, <a href="/tags/vollmann">vollmann</a>, <a href="/tags/franzen">franzen</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/powers">powers</a>, <a href="/tags/wallace">wallace</a>, <a href="/tags/baudrillard">baudrillard</a>, <a href="/tags/tech">tech</a>, <a href="/tags/digit">digit</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/jameson">jameson</a>, <a href="/tags/critic">critic</a>, <a href="/tags/delillo">delillo</a>, <a href="/tags/luhmann">luhmann</a>, <a href="/tags/novak">novak</a>, <a href="/tags/cyber">cyber</a>, <a href="/tags/frelik">frelik</a>, <a href="/tags/kunow">kunow</a>, <a href="/tags/coover">coover</a>, <a href="/tags/doctorow">doctorow</a>, <a href="/tags/esders">esders</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/mayer">mayer</a>, <a href="/tags/kraus">kraus</a>, <a href="/tags/schneck">schneck</a>, <a href="/tags/mccaffery">mccaffery</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/sontag">sontag</a>, <a href="/tags/vitas">vitas</a>, <a href="/tags/wittgenste">wittgenste</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator779 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comRichard Powers after Louis Zukofsky: A Prospectus of the Skyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/composition
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joe Amato</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1997-04-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Prelude</h2>
<p>In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call “content” across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers’s <span class="booktitle">The Gold Bug Variations</span> over and against Louis Zukofsky’s <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical and creative attention to perhaps the most neglected literary form of this century in North America - the long poem (and I am not the first to make this observation). At the same time, I hope to give some indication of why we might do well to continue to turn our critical and creative attention to the ways in which the literary constitutes a valuable site through which to understand our works and days.</p>
<p>Richard Powers is an accomplished novelist whose five (soon to be six) novels plumb the controversies, latent and teeming, inherent to our highly technological milieu. I daresay that, for most of my readers, Louis Zukofsky, though an equally accomplished poet, will be a somewhat less recognizable, and more inaccessible, figure. I hope to show why <span class="lightEmphasis">both</span> authors warrant continued scrutiny, why the work of literature, and of reviewing literature as I propose, may be vital to sustaining our social ecologies. I have veered away from the biographical <span class="lightEmphasis">per se</span>. Readers are advised to consult the Terrell anthology cited at essay’s end for a fine account of “man and poet,” as well as the more recent anthology of essays superbly edited by Scroggins. With regard to Powers’s novels, I would simply observe (happily) that more and more critical essays exploring same are making their way into print (e.g., see Labinger). Which raises the issue of enabling technologies. One reason this piece is not <span class="lightEmphasis">in print</span> (so to speak) is because there really are relatively few print journals that seem to entertain less orthodox notions of what a review can be. Simply by virtue of not having-not yet anyway-acquiesced entirely to past publishing strictures, on-line spaces can be made to reflect a somewhat different writing occasion, a somewhat different response to textuality, to networks of readers and writers. Something to strive for, as I see it.</p>
<p>Which is, after all, the point.</p>
<h2>A Prospectus of the Sky</h2>
<p class="longQuotation">What can then be seen as happening, in each transition, is a historical development of social language itself: finding new means, new forms and then new definitions of a changing practical consciousness. Many of the active values of ‘literature’ have then to be seen, not as tied to the concept, which came to limit as well as to summarize them, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice which already substantially, and now at the level of theoretical redefinition, is moving beyond its old forms.</p>
<p>Raymond Williams, <span class="booktitle">Marxism and Literature</span></p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">One hopes for a renewable literature.</span></p>
<p>This assertion-a pronominal, even reflexive declaration of a wish, hence almost a wish - does not measure itself against the cultural redundancies we-many of us - are experiencing. Not against a “golden age,” not out of a desperately felt surplus or decline. Rather, a measure simply, perhaps too succinctly, of renewal, a summary impulse, a “when all is said and done.” It implies a revaluation of the place of the alphabet on the contemporary scene. It presumes nothing so much as a sense that ideologies of the marketplace, of the public domain, have compromised the status and reception of art in general, of literary arts in particular. And it intimates a signifying practice that gives good reason, and ample opportunity, to come back to. But to renew <span class="lightEmphasis">against</span> - against the impulse of the Same? Against the products of renewal itself?</p>
<p>There are, as there must ever be, precedents.</p>
<p>I have in front of me Richard Powers’s <span class="booktitle">The Gold Bug Variations</span> - a book steeped in so many ways in traditions, high modernist in its high regard for and literal recycling of the past, a book grown classic even as I put it down, bewildered by its thematic reach. Its reach extends both backward - through aesthetic innovation, through art history, through science, through the genetic mechanism itself - and forward-forward, I would hazard, in cosmic terms, by way of promise. The novel promises a future of novel variations. Variations, that is to say, on the new.</p>
<p>That is to say, as I read it, this novel presupposes that which can be renewed. It renews our attention to what is at stake in an understanding of ourselves. It projects, against the technological, postmodern, urban devastation lurking at its margins, nothing less than a global reconstruction project. It forecasts, with stubborn and literate persistence, the coming of a social consciousness rooted in a cosmopolitan ecology, the requisite replication of ancient substance and moral imperative amid a renewed understanding of the cultural and genetic ferment.</p>
<p>Nothing formulaic here, and something that resists the inevitable reduction to metaphor. As Charles Olson reminds us, “There are laws, that is to say, the human universe is as discoverable as that other. And as definable.” And again: “The difficulty of discovery (in the close world which the human is because it is ourselves and nothing outside us, like the other) is, that definition is as much a part of the act as is sensation itself, in this sense, that life is preoccupation with itself, that conjecture about it is as much of it as its coming at us, its going on. In other words, we are ourselves both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition (Olson 53).”</p>
<p>This is what I take to be the source of a sobering, even somber anxiety underwriting Powers’s novel from start to finish: the recognition that what the human organism can know of itself is at once but a lived and living exemplification of what that organism is in the process of becoming.</p>
<p>And if, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, genetics, chemistry and so forth, the human species has not changed all that much over the past millennia - well, human knowledge, however institutionally codified, must therefore proceed within a fixed and biologically-prejudiced determinism. Epistemology hence short-circuited by the proven, if presumed, positivities of life, the spiral loop, as it were, closed genetically, yet open to endless trial-runs of the dictum: We are defined by what we cannot know. All knowledge resides within phenotypical boundaries, subjectivity itself subject to the sample mean, no more mutable than mutation. Henceforth, human being as falsifiable premise, variation on a grander theme. A theme grander, that is, than its various subjects, defined in such terms.</p>
<p>The consequences of such insight for a literature, literatures-for any human practice - are profound. Or, perhaps more realistically, could be.</p>
<p>But for literature - as I use this latter, a transforming institutional site, or better, an event unfolding against prevailing orthodoxies, an instance of writing, of the alphabetic technologies as these are themselves creolizing, digitally, within a media mix, morphing the very substance of endeavor, and obligation…</p>
<p>And if the way we pose our questions cannot effect a differential and linguistic drift, are in fact <span class="lightEmphasis">affects</span> of same, what of the social factor, the recombinant communal soup, or for that matter, the human-qua-social science? Is the sociobiological impulse the implied corollary? Are we to situate our knowledges - of ourselves, of others-as first and foremost derivative of our genetic makeup, or does the sheer presence of other living beings somehow compromise the solitary organismic truth? Are “we” defined by our knowledge of “us,” or by our self-knowledge?</p>
<p>One: What is the social narrative-which is to predicate a confluence of a specific literary sensibility (i.e., narrative as opposed to, say, lyric) with “the social” - that permits fragments (episodes?) of a particularly human history, however fictional, to be interwoven throughout this cosmic metanarrative? Two, as to <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span> per se: what is the significance of Bach in prefiguring the literary-philosophical undertow of the novel?</p>
<p>Regarding this latter, I wish at once to yield the floor to those possessing the musicological expertise requisite to disentangling the formal symmetries and correspondences Powers develops throughout <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span> (narratively, thematically) in codifying his various “messages.” My question turns, rather, on the pertinence of Bach’s (fugual) oeuvre to a philosophy of art, of life.</p>
<p>II.</p>
<p>(I must assume for my purposes a basic familiarity with (or at least access to) Zukofsky’s text. Part I of my prospectus offers a critical glimpse of Zukofsky (who died in 1978) via his long poem <span class="booktitle">“A”,</span> in 24 sections (as Robert Creeley notes in a back-cover blurb, “the human measure of day”), begun in 1928, the poet age 24, final entries penned in 1974.) <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 1 begins</p>
<p>A</p>
<p>Round of fiddles playing Bach.</p>
<p>and proceeds to detail, as Don Byrd explains, “the aftermath of a concert (“Shape” 180).” “The incidents which attract Zukofsky’s interest seem almost inconsequential, ” continues Byrd, “He is struck by the contrast between the audience of which he is a part and Bach’s original audience, for which Bach was as remarkable as the father of twenty-two children as for his music.” Byrd’s point is that Bach’s audience, unlike the “modern audience,” was a community; further, that this sense of artistic isolation, even alienation, is an unlikely experiential opening to an eight-hundred page poem. “The reader might reasonably expect,” Byrd notes, “to be instructed in these lines how to read the poem,” yet “If anything we seem to be given miscues (180).”</p>
<p>Elsewhere, Byrd has written, by way of prefacing a reader’s entry into the Zukofsky corpus, and by way of arguing that what is needed to restore meaningfulness to “the category of the person” is recognition of its “opacity at the center of knowledge, a contingency” in “an actual, finite and therefore knowable world” (211-12; and I excerpt rather haphazardly from <span class="booktitle">The Poetics of the Common Knowledge</span>):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The whole of <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> is an investigation into the inadequacies and limitations of the single vision and the single voice….I sometimes think <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> is a self-interpreting poem. Most lines that need glossing are glossed somewhere in the poem itself…. Some mathematical formulations, in themselves tautologies, have applications in science and engineering. Zukofsky is brother to the practical mathematician; the performer is the engineer. The meaning of <span class="booktitle">“A,”</span> like that of other poetry, is revealed in its use, in its gestures becoming accessible…. <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> is possibly a fugue. Like some other long twentieth-century poems, it is possibly an analogue to the <span class="booktitle">Commedia</span>. As a domestic poem in twenty-four books, it is possibly an analogue to the <span class="booktitle">Odyssey</span>. There are also suggestions of less expressive forms…. We necessarily begin to believe that whatever unity life or language may exhibit, it is not neatly round. (243 ff.)</p>
<p>This final observation strikes at the heart of the matter, for if Zukofsky is “brother” to the mathematician, he is nonetheless engaged in an art that requires that we who read, much as he who has written, “fill the space where word[s] have their full-bodied and disruptive existence and where the moving human body finds itsproper sphere” (<span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>). If Byrd is correct (and I think he is), though the poetic epic/saga-analogue opens with a “round of fiddles,” one nonetheless anticipates a movement that is far from “neatly round,” that echoes and enacts the indefiniteness of its titular provocation, its lifelong unraveling. As Hugh Kenner explains, citing Zukofsky himself (and again, haphazard excerpts):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This is a game of alertness to possibilities, single words floating loose to attach themselves to simultaneous contexts. We’re forced to follow them… if we want to see how the poet makes his transitions. It’s a game that commences at the top of the first page… where <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> is the title of the poem, and its first word (as of the alphabet), and the indefinite article, and the note musicians tune by…. ‘A case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words <span class="lightEmphasis">the</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span>: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve,’ wrote Zukofsky in the 1946 essay that is unfortunately missing from this reprint. ‘Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words.’ (Kenner 190-91)</p>
<p>Two stanzas from <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 1:</p>
<p>The lights dim, and the brain when the flesh dims.</p>
<p>Hats picked up from under seats.</p>
<p>Galleries darkening.</p>
<p>“Not that exit, Sir!”</p>
<p>Ecdysis: the serpent coming out, molting,</p>
<p>As tho blood stained the floor as the foot stepped,</p>
<p>Bleeding chamfer for shoulder:</p>
<p>“Not that exit!”</p>
<p>“Devil! Which?”-</p>
<p>Blood and desire to graft what you desire,</p>
<p>But no heart left for boys’ voices.</p>
<p>Desire longing for perfection. (Zukofsky 2)</p>
<p>….</p>
<p>It was also Passover.</p>
<p>The blood’s tide like the music.</p>
<p>A round of fiddles playing</p>
<p>Without effort-</p>
<p>As into the fields and forgetting to die.</p>
<p>The streets smoothed over as fields,</p>
<p>Not even the friction of wheels,</p>
<p>Feet off ground:</p>
<p>As beyond effort-</p>
<p>Music leaving no traces,</p>
<p>Not dying, and leaving no traces.</p>
<p>Not boiling to put pen to paper</p>
<p>Perhaps a few things to remember- (Zukofsky 3-4)</p>
<p>Here is indication that mortal circumstance - the “darkening” of earthly night that brings about an end to “dim” flesh (and consciousness)-follows close upon desire-but desire to what end? “Desire longing for perfection” may “graft” the occasion to memory, to the page, much as blood marks the passage “stained” of one’s departure, but this yields “no heart left for boys’ voices,” for the singularly innocent play of youth (whose value is left unclear at this point, save for reference to Bach’s children). Hence “A round of fiddles playing/Without effort” becomes a pure form, a form that, “Not dying,” “forgetting to die,” is, like an abstraction of life itself, a perpetually unfolding present “leaving no traces,” moving frictionlessly forward. And it is out of this occasion, with the remarked but unremarkable fact of Passover lingering as a mythological backdrop-passed over, as it were - it is out of this ad hoc actuality of event that the author - for remembrance’ sake? - has chosen “to put pen to paper.”</p>
<p>Note <span class="lightEmphasis">my</span> graft, my choice of the (above) two stanzas, and my (now electronic) gloss. This suggests, is meant to suggest, the self-critical apparatus to which Byrd refers. <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> anticipates its aftermath (recall “the aftermath of a concert”); in effect, it comments on, provides a basis for, ensuing commentary.</p>
<p>Back to Bach:</p>
<p>The beginning and one stanza from <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12 (written midcentury, the midpoint of the poem’s twenty-four sections):</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Out of deep need</span></p>
<p>Four trombones and the organ in the nave</p>
<p>A torch surged-</p>
<p>Timed the theme Bach’s name,</p>
<p>Dark, larch and ridge, night:</p>
<p>From my body to other bodies</p>
<p>Angels and bastards interchangeably</p>
<p>Who had better sing and tell stories</p>
<p>Before all will be abstracted.</p>
<p>So goes: first, <span class="lightEmphasis">shape</span></p>
<p>The creation-</p>
<p>A mist from the earth,</p>
<p>The whole face of the ground;</p>
<p>Then <span class="lightEmphasis">rhythm</span> -</p>
<p>And breathed breath of life;</p>
<p>Then <span class="lightEmphasis">style</span> -</p>
<p>That from the eye its function takes -</p>
<p>“Taste” we say - a living soul.</p>
<p>First, glyph; then syllabary,</p>
<p>Then letters. Ratio after</p>
<p>Eyes, tale in sound. First, dance. Then</p>
<p>Voice. First body - to be seen and to pulse</p>
<p>Happening together.</p>
<p>Before the void there was neither</p>
<p>Being nor non-being;</p>
<p>Desire, came warmth,</p>
<p>Or which, first?</p>
<p>Until the sages looked in their hearts</p>
<p>For the kinship of what is in what is not.</p>
<p>Or in the heart or in the head?</p>
<p>Quire after over three millennia.</p>
<p>….</p>
<p>Who tells time on all fours, yet moves</p>
<p>Shape, love-</p>
<p>sense and openhandedness</p>
<p>Blest</p>
<p>Ardent</p>
<p>Celia, speak simply, rarely scarce, seldom -</p>
<p>Happy, immeasurable love</p>
<p>heart or head’s greater part unhurt and happy,</p>
<p>things that bear harmony</p>
<p>certain in concord with reason.</p>
<p>From the spring of Art of Fugue:</p>
<p>The parts of a fugue should behave like reasonable men</p>
<p>in an orderly discussion</p>
<p>From the source of <span class="booktitle">A Midsummer-Night’s Dream</span>:</p>
<p>How comes this gentle concord in the world?</p>
<p>The order that rules music, the same</p>
<p>controls the placing of the stars and the feathers</p>
<p>in a bird’s wing.</p>
<p>In the middle of harmony</p>
<p>Most heavenly music</p>
<p>For the universe is true enough.</p>
<p>Four horses like four notes. (Zukofsky 126-28)</p>
<p>{Shape, rhythm, style} to {glyph, syllabary, letters} to {dance, voice}, to {body}, ultimately to, whether “in the heart or in the head,” {love}. But this, too, must “bear harmony/certain in concord with reason.” Each iteration must attend, that is, to the demands of form, the “order that rules music,” the source of “harmony”and “concord” both in nature and in humankind (“reasonable men”). Here is Hugh Kenner again on <span class="booktitle">“A”</span>:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Such hidden laws, presenting a different face to the poet and to us, not only prevent him from dashing things off without thought, they also suspend the whole poem on some plane other than the plane of unresisted discourse, much as musical laws, though we may not know what they are, yield effects we do not confuse with random sonority. For Zukofsky’s fondness for mathematical form parallels Bach’s, who is often invoked in <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> as the active presiding spirit. (189)</p>
<p>And on <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12 in particular:</p>
<p>Bach played on the notes B, A, C, H for no Olympian reason; <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12, correspondingly, on the words:</p>
<p>Blest</p>
<p>Ardent</p>
<p>Celia</p>
<p>Happy</p>
<p>also for no reason except that the formal problem, as for Bach, is a pretty one, and the domestic feeling of Louis for Celia, an encompassing and compelling one. (194)</p>
<p>And again on <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12, Burton Hatlen as to the significance of fours (a persistent numerological theme in <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span> as well):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">To structure <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12 around a pattern of four elements is a characteristically modernist gesture, as is Zukofsky’s very decision to seek a formal model in a specific baroque composition. Such decisions presuppose the closure, the completion that is so integral to the ideology of modernism, from the poetics of the self-contained Imagist observation to the doctrine of poetic “objectification” (and even to the New Critical notion of the well-wrought urn). In contrast, Zukofsky’s transition from modernism to postmodernism, from a teleological poetics of completion to a more open-ended poetics of contingency, discovery, and play, is signaled by his disruption of these patterns, his decision to leave his own work, like <span class="booktitle">The Art of the Fugue</span>, incomplete, unfinished. (228)</p>
<p>Eric Mottram on the Zukofsky corpus:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Zukofsky requires a kind of naturalist classicism - Bach is natural and society should be another instance; but there is little to suggest the degrading aristocratic conditions within which Bach toiled. All we get is ‘He who creates/Is a mode of these inertial systems.’ (Bartok understood the relationship of leaf-structure to his music, and maintained a social conscience.) Zukofsky’s eye is rather on perfection - and this persistence is most celebratedly given in lines quoted in section 3 of “An Objective” (1930-1):</p>
<p>An objective-rays of the object brought to focus.</p>
<p>An objective-nature as creator-desire</p>
<p>for what is objectively perfect.</p>
<p>Inextricably the direction of history and contemporary</p>
<p>particulars.</p>
<p>(qtd. in Terrell 423)</p>
<p>And Mottram again:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Love is exemplified by the honour of music made by his family [his wife Celia, a composer, and son Paul, a child-prodigy on violin] for him - a form of paradise which organizes the play between natural (the leaf structure again) and man-made (music), itself the core of the previous sections of <span class="booktitle">“A.”</span> So that <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 12 can begin again with Bach - ‘out of deep need’ in 1950-1-the measure of perfection, and proceed to become the first major fulfillment of Zukofsky’s career, a work to put with the best of <span class="booktitle">Paterson</span>, the <span class="booktitle">Cantos</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Maximus</span>. (qtd. in Terrell 425)</p>
<p>Love as “honour of music”: Mottram reads “[d]esire longing for perfection” perhaps a bit too insistently, but he is surely correct in pointing to the associated “Objectivist school” premise (of which Zukofsky was a primary exponent). Worth noting here is that a motioning toward perfection is in no way to be confused with perfection’s realization, or even the dream of same.</p>
<p>But the “naturalist classicism” to which Mottram refers - Bach as underscoring the naturalness of social form - can, in contemporary terms, be understood as precursor to the sociobiological; hence, to turn to the arts and sciences of language practice, auguring the much-speculated linguistic-genetic correspondence - grammatical structure as taking its lead from biological substrate - one of the controversial critical sites underwriting the tropic recursions and ruminations of <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span>. For Zukofsky, the sheer reach of social forms, such as language, the impulse to celestial transcendence, is to be found at the intersection of human cognition and e(x)ternal nature, an empirical conjunction of inside and outside less endless phenomenological oscillation. From <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 22 (1970-73):</p>
<p>Summers looking across marches to</p>
<p>mountains an old mind sees</p>
<p>more, thinking of a <span class="lightEmphasis">thought</span></p>
<p>not his thought, older complexities:</p>
<p>the fractional state of the</p>
<p>annals, a bird’s merrythought graving</p>
<p>of quill and down, apposed</p>
<p>human cranium’s dendritical crystallizations offer</p>
<p>no sure estimate of antiquity</p>
<p>only archaic time unchanged unchangeable:</p>
<p>aeolian loess, glacier carrying <span class="lightEmphasis">graywether</span> -</p>
<p>chipped and rubbed contorted drift -</p>
<p>concentric bed blue clay-white,</p>
<p>yellow sand, striped loam-blue</p>
<p>laminated. (Zukofsky 512)</p>
<p>“[L]aminated,” that is, temporally, both of age, “an old mind,” and of the geological ages - to follow one possible pun, the glacial “drift.” And here is where Zukofsky’s lifelong endeavor begins to open to the moral-ecological obligations of which Powers’s text serves as an extended meditation (both works are, finally, so much more). A final, enigmatic excerpt, from <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 23 (1973-74), just prior to the Handel masque of <span class="booktitle">“A”</span> - 24:</p>
<p>A living calendar, names inwreath’d</p>
<p>Bach’s innocence longing Handel’s untouched.</p>
<p>Cue in new-old quantities - ‘Don’t</p>
<p>bother me’ - Bach quieted bothered;</p>
<p>since Eden gardens labor, For</p>
<p>series distributes harmonies, attraction Governs</p>
<p>destinies. Histories dye the streets:</p>
<p>intimate whispers magnanimity flourishes: doubts’</p>
<p>passionate Judgment, passion the task. (Zukofsky 563)</p>
<p>Building from Bach, the poet returns some forty-five years later to Bach “bothered” - Bach (still) dead, his presence yet dy(e)ing. Read as since [the time of] Eden gardens labor,</p>
<p>For series distributes harmonies,</p>
<p>attraction Governs destinies.</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>because Eden gardens labor,</p>
<p>For series distributes harmonies,</p>
<p>attraction Governs destinies.</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>For since Eden gardens labor</p>
<p>attraction Governs series, distributes harmonies, destinies.</p>
<p>Zukofsky’s five-word lines intimate the lyrical variations wrought of “intimate” historical “whispers,” whispering “new-old” passion (as, again, love), the “passionate Judgment” of the “living calendar.” The possible variation in meaning itself is considerable, provokes all sorts of slippage. Should we understand “series” colloquially, as a succession of events or things, or should we hear it instead as a homophone for Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture? Or should we treat “series” in mathematical terms, as the sum of an infinite sequence of numbers? Should we be thinking here of musical notes, perhaps a harmonic series - in which a given tone dominates, but softer notes are nonetheless sounded? Is the historical thus a function of a new-old resonating recursively (so to speak) with an old-new? And might we even read here (admittedly a bit of a stretch) <span class="lightEmphasis">soil series</span>? Does the Earth “labor” to produce (whether little or much), to bring forth the labor of its line-ages, its life forms? Does finding our way thus “back to the garden” (CSNY) suggest something about production and reproduction, the distribution through generations of species variances, recombinations, human destiny a function of love, procreation, attraction? What could be more complex? Or, as in the opening “Aria”-poem of <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span> (“The Perpetual Calendar”), “What could be simpler?”</p>
<p>III.</p>
<p>The following from <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span>: from Jan’s wish list, subjunctive revelations come late in the novel, addressed silently to Todd:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I would tell him everything I have found. I would lay my notebooks open to him. How the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than a plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constricting possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always ago-between, a sign between signature and nature. (Powers 515)</p>
<p>Note the reflexive quality of the text, in effect proffering itself as “go-between,” a contemporary version of the medieval world’s “book of nature” - or, if you prefer, an extrapolation/example of the Emersonian doctrine of word/nature compliance, or an updated Dickensian version/sample of inheritance, cultural transmission - preservation, or… - that codes itself as nature-sign, sign-nature. Again, Jan deliberating:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">If I have read the texts correctly - and who knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the blurry words is - then the grand synthesis that ten years ago pulled all biology into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself. But that living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a language that is itself also just a rough guess, a running, reversible analogy. The intermediary of language alone makes it possible to run trials, load experiment. Only by splitting the name from the thing it stands for can tinkering take place. Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is. (517)</p>
<p>That “a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself”: location, location, and location of that which is in-definite - <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> living thing, <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> postulate. We are, organismically, axioms of our particular places in time, the temporal here measured in evolutionary terms. “Evolution, the first arrangement of living things,” Jan ruminates, “that doesn’t commit the <span class="lightEmphasis">post hoc</span> fallacy, lays it out: invention mothers necessity.” That is, the causal necessities of life come <span class="lightEmphasis">after</span> the actuality of “arrangement,” of differential (genetic) order. “The feasibility of each inherited variation - theme elaborated by mutation-breeds out until there is no more single epic but four million variant variorum editions, each matched to the shelf where it finds itself (518-19).” And again, <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span>, too, will takes its place upon the generic shelf.</p>
<p>From Chapter XXVII, “The Goldberg Variations”:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">But the severe mathematics of recursive architecture are lost in the first ornament of aria. By the time the potential of the original sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but the faintest line of that all-embracing ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening to inversions and midpoint symmetries and numerologies and the closing of the diatonic circle. He was following the death of his friends, listening to how love fled, anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy’s crippling, detecting and replaying his own departure from science: hearing, in the descent of four notes from Do, the script of life’s particulars, brute specifics that too often became too much, too full, too awful to bear, too unendurably, transiently beautiful. (583)</p>
<p>And perhaps, to use prior terms, too “round.” The descent is both from Do and do, from that which is to be enacted in its particulars. The measure is of a “transient” beauty, beauty that, in order to be lived (and to gloss Keats) must of invention (hence necessity) die. Moreover:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">To play the piece - to buzz the length of the keyboard for an hour, to barrage, to cross over, careen dangerously - requires only a feat of digital dexterity. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself. To compose it, Bach insisted, required only that one work as hard as he did. To hear in the organizing software the unique, unspecifiable odds against any metaphor ever arising on this earth out of nothing, out of mere notes, requires something more. It needs the conviction, in a third favorite phrase of the provincial choirmaster, that all things must be possible, sayable, particular, real. (586)</p>
<p>The particular is the real, is the possible, is the sayable. But to “hear” the variations (the novel?) in such terms one must have the “conviction” that such hearing follows from (a la Zukofsky) “new-old” pattern, musical-musicological laws, and not vice-versa. “The world’s pattern was not assembled for the mind’s comprehension;” elaborates Powers/Jan?/Ressler?, “rather the other way around (586).” The performance, one might say, depends on “digital dexterity” for sheer saying, but what is said takes on particular meaning only in accord with a prior shaping (socially, culturally, within biological limits) of hearer to what is heard.</p>
<p>One might say that, in <span class="booktitle">Gold Bug</span>, all told, as in <span class="booktitle">“A,”</span> the margins demarcate a preemptive, life-formed world of natural orders, rendered through correlative social orders, practices, symbolic forms - language.</p>
<p>So: to an amalgam, naturally.</p>
<p>IV.</p>
<p>Too tidy, such blood<br />
signatured.<br />
What could be simpler<br />
than, seeking, an accidental positivist… ?<br />
This c/should all have been all over<br />
[he<br />
writes, in print]<br />
there,<br />
electronic, there<br />
would have<br />
been<br />
a time<br />
for such a<br />
ga [clipper chlipped loss.hmmmmmm…</p>
<p>Cy hype r lin ink ed: something tells US<br />
that this mode node mediu whatev<br />
is defunct by default, by what we didn’t act<br />
on, that whatever<br />
is renewable<br />
strictly put is contemporary?</p>
<p>Still, I remain com(per)plexed<br />
much as Paul G-o-o-d-m-a-n (quicksilverrecollectionevidence<br />
uprooted - &gt; download (look him up,<br />
if needs to a bit of a conservative, “neolithic”<br />
anarchist, unwilling<br />
to dispense<br />
with the prototools, cols-phenotype, community<br />
entirely-that is, nor to pass over, simply because there<br />
a past, but through and through to come, sexed, traversing filaments -</p>
<p>“all those things<br />
that don’t change<br />
come what may”</p>
<p>[Neil Young; see a future WWW, lobally databased (wink)]</p>
<p>:::::::::</p>
<p>soft focus, close-up<br />
of the obligation, the promise<br />
chief compromise of the night, binding<br />
end to end, a beginning<br />
the codon, simpler still</p>
<p>history<br />
is made<br />
at night<br />
a Romantic gleaning</p>
<p>(think Borzage Boyer Arthur, circa ‘35-more trivia)</p>
<p>You, we just don’t know</p>
<p>what you’re capable, made<br />
of. To community</p>
<p>“The idea/Is not/In the mind/That can cut off/Our bodies.”</p>
<p>[Z’s “A” 234 - these institutions are murder]</p>
<p>No death to history, ideology anymore<br />
than form: the formless know<br />
the surefire value of form, know<br />
when to say so. Only histories die, history</p>
<p>resolved, metaphysical<br />
is made at night.</p>
<p>I was born in 1955, Gould<br />
on my brother’s birthday, years<br />
prior, and a desire to explore, years<br />
later, toward<br />
“arithmetical correspondence between theme<br />
and variation” (cf. cd liner notes)<br />
the variations, that is, objectives, xyz’s<br />
leading back<br />
to the recording studio.</p>
<p>A (through P) to Z: “Louie, i.e., Lou, O lieu, lieu I.<br />
Z (through A) to P: “We are things, say, like a quantum of action<br />
De produof enerfin edgy an tict me, nowd<br />
Iords which rnth whymew how sone nog’s<br />
exasection Fos absercion turnact framtot requoted<br />
Vales o labur powvet dape haroximate.”<br />
P (through A) to Z: “lour half veveled Afar fortram rhome<br />
hed, tinho wanhe tynured itneosm het,<br />
en thrace of regrence wofes wor’t cokme<br />
to cure the persistent call of<br />
tonic.”</p>
<p>Talk show, film, music<br />
video, zapping the channels, evenings<br />
hybrida abreastwork<br />
to sustain a measure of cognitive<br />
or kultural dissonance<br />
gracias Word’s drag<br />
coefficient, like most tekhne<br />
interviewing, intervening the dead<br />
is not unreasonable<br />
things are saved<br />
orthogonal, snowed in<br />
spaces, luminescent…</p>
<p>It is not unreasonable to assume There is no parting from your own shadow. the occasional and arbitrary beauty of for(u)m To experience this faith whose origin nor in subject nor self is to know that in being ourselves we are but in a hereafter, a posthereafter more thanourselves: to know that our experi ence, dim and fragmentary asi t is, henceforth a past of such yet soun ds the utmost depths ofreality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves posts, now in a system of things: to know that this system He certainly did amuse some includes the harmony of logical rationality,and and he certainly did interest some</p>
<p>the harmony of aesthetic achievement: and he certainly did not disappoint some and he certainly did go on being living to know that, while the harmony of logic lies and certainly he did quit e clearly understand upon theuniverse as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it being a young one in being a young one and he certainly did very nearly completelyclearly and quite often explain this thing to some who were and to some whowere then not themselves then young as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues now:</p>
<p>if laws there be, of a universe, of a sense ununiversalized [or “onioniversalized”-P (through Internet) to A]</p>
<p>if beauty is form from things given<br />
over, these spaces as well</p>
<p>a flux incarnate, worked or reworked<br />
by what is worked, of land, sea and<br />
sky</p>
<p>of flesh spiraled of pleasure<br />
and principle</p>
<p>if there is justice yet to be sought<br />
in a cloud:</p>
<p>history is made<br />
of loss<br />
the day<br />
of night<br />
night<br />
a, of, in solitary act<br />
the time timing<br />
the times</p>
<p>renewed</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Byrd, Don. <span class="booktitle">The Poetics of the Common Knowledge</span>. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.</p>
<p>—. “The Shape of Zukovsky’s Canon.” Terrell 163-185.</p>
<p>Hatlen, Burton. “From Modernism to Postmodernism: Zukofsky’s ‘A’-12.” Scroggins 214-229.</p>
<p>Kenner, Hugh. “Two Pieces on ‘A.’” Terrell 187-202.</p>
<p>Labinger, Jay A. “Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Power’s Gold Bug Variations.” <span class="booktitle">Configurations 3.1</span> (Winter 1995): 79-93.</p>
<p>Olson, Charles. “Human Universe.” <span class="booktitle">Selected Writings of Charles Olson</span>. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. 53-66</p>
<p>Powers, Richard. <span class="booktitle">The Gold Bug Variations</span>. New York: William Morrow, 1991.</p>
<p>Rosenthal, M.L. “Zukovsky: ‘All My Hushed Sources.’” Terrell 227-233</p>
<p>Scroggins, Mark, ed. <span class="booktitle">Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukovsky</span>. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Terrell, Carroll F., ed. <span class="booktitle">Louis Zukovsky: Man and Poet</span>. Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 1979.</p>
<p>Williams, Raymond. <span class="booktitle">Marxism and Literature</span>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Zukovsky, Louis. “A.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/williams">williams</a>, <a href="/tags/scroggins">scroggins</a>, <a href="/tags/tech">tech</a>, <a href="/tags/olson">olson</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/mottram">mottram</a>, <a href="/tags/terrell">terrell</a>, <a href="/tags/bach">bach</a>, <a href="/tags/amato">amato</a>, <a href="/tags/powers">powers</a>, <a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator762 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com